November 2011

November 30, 2011

The Republican nomination race is a very odd kind of wrestling match. Mitt Romney stands in the middle of the ring, while a series of opponents take turns to challenge him. One by one, they square up to Romney - then they punch themselves in the face and get carried off.

Next up? Newt Gingrich. Come again? Yes, The Newt is back! He has gone from nowhere in the prediction markets to a 30% chance of winning the nomination. Having, along with everyone else, written him off, I must confess that his sheer bloody-minded resilience is quite impressive. But the Republicans would have to be batshit crazy to nominate this thrice-married, absurdly pompous, flamboyantly eccentric blowhard. Luckily for Obama, they are batshit crazy at the moment.

What does the Newt surge mean for the race? Well, first it means a lot of entertainment. Newt is nothing if not good value. He has already compared himself, favourably and unironically, to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and his wife to Nancy Reagan. There's plenty more where that came from.

Second, it shows just how desperate many Republicans are to avoid having to make do with Mitt (could that be Romney's campaign slogan if things get desperate? 'Make Do With Mitt'?). If I were Romney I'd have left the race in a huff by now. It must be a little depressing.

Third, it's good news for Hunstman, who is creeping up in some polls. Gingrich can hurt Romney, but is probably not strong enough to win the nomination. If the Trump-Perry-Cain pattern is repeated Huntsman might just end up looking like the only viable alternative to a severely weakened Romney. This is what his campaign have been hoping for.

Will he be able to seize his opportunity? We'll see. I'm sceptical. Huntsman, though highly qualified, seems to lack a political X-Factor. His performances in debates and interviews have been competent, but bland, overly cautious and unexciting. There's been very little evidence of the killer instinct Obama exhibited vs Clinton, at this stage of the race in 2007. He'll need to step up a gear if he's to pull this off. I'm sure Newt will be only too happy to advise.

If it weren't already obvious, yesterday's statement by the Chancellor has clarified the central political challenge for all parties over the next five to ten years: explaining the best way to do more with less.

It's now clear that the structural deficit won't be history by the time of the next election; indeed it may well still be with us come the one after. It's also clear that we face several years of slow growth and low revenues. Meanwhile, the ageing process goes on, which is a matter of regret to the Treasury almost as much as it is to every one of us over 25. We are an economy with rising demand for public services and stagnant demand for private goods and services. Not a great combo.

The new landscape poses a big question to both main parties, and as yet, neither one is answering it.

The Tories are struggling to retain control of their narrative. Their story is something like this: we are clearing up a mess, and in order to do so we have to inflict temporary pain. But it will be worth it, because in a few years time we'll have cleared up the mess. Things will be back to normal, and you'll have us to thank.

But it's now becoming clear that the mess isn't going to be cleared up before the next election, and - even more crucially - that there will never be a return to 'normal'. We are going through a painful adjustment to a new and permanently different condition. That doesn't necessarily mean we're all doomed, although certainly, we'll be a less rich country than we were, or appeared to be. What it does mean is that we'll need to organise our public services differently; we'll have to do more with less. Making the case for that will require real imagination and political courage. The Tories, other than the too-vague and now derided 'Big Society', haven't given voters a vision of what comes next. As a result, they're associated with the pain when there's no relief in sight.

Labour are in an even worse position. As Daniel Finkelstein points out in another excellent column today, by criticising 'Plan A' they are unintentionally giving the government credit for having a plan at all. Meanwhile, their own plan, which involves borrowing more money in the middle of a debt crisis, is a non-starter for most voters. It might make economic sense but in current form it's very hard to explain, and the two Eds certainly aren't doing a good job of explaining it. As Finkelstein says, by criticising every cut the government makes, Labour is reinforcing, rather than undermining, the government's contention to be providing leadership in tough times.

In my unscientific view, politicians frequently over-estimate the importance of ideological positioning, and under-estimate the importance of being seen to be effective; that is, of being seen to have a plan and the ability to put it into action. Within an acceptable middle range of the ideological spectrum, perceived effectiveness matters much more than political direction. It's why the smart attack on Obama, as Romney alone amongst the Republican candidate knows, isn't that he's a socialist bent on destroying America, but that he is utterly ineffectual, a nice guy out of his depth. It's why Labour should be portraying this government as chaotic and hapless, rather than reckless and evil.

But the even bigger challenge for Miliband and Balls, as Hopi Sen has been saying for some time, is reinventing Labour's offer for an era of permanent austerity. How do you make the case for a social democratic party that can't spend any more money?

November 29, 2011

Svetlana Stalina, the only daughter of Josef Stalin, was born on February 28, 1926. She died as Lana Peters, on November 22 of this year, at the age of 85, in a nursing home in Wisconsin. Her father nicknamed her "Little Sparrow". She spent the whole of her adult life trying and failing to escape his dark shadow.

November 28, 2011

Here is the Democratic Party's attempt to strangle Mitt Romney's presidential campaign at birth (or at least, before he wins the nomination):

This ad will run on TV in six swing states, and will be heralded by press events across the country (and there's a longer, online version here). That represents a significant effort, considering the GOP hasn't even held its first primary yet.

Presuming the DNC is acting in coordination with the Obama campaign, this tells us two things:

- Obama is very keen not to face Romney in the general election. Like Nate Silver, his people have done the maths and worked out that if the president faces a credible, moderate Republican, his odds are 50:50 at best - and if the economy takes a hit from the Eurozone crisis, worse than that. But if he faces, say, Newt Gingrich, well, suddenly things will look rather brighter. So they are intervening in the Republican primary. The Obama folks are taking a calculated risk here. Romney will try to turn this to his advantage. He will claim that Obama is scared of him, and he'll be right. But he also knows that they are hitting him where it hurts, in the eyes of GOP voters.

- If Romney is nominated (and despite the rise of Newt and the continuing lack of enthusiasm for The Mitt, that remains the most likely scenario) the Obama campaign want to ensure that he is indelibly branded with the flip-flop label from the moment his general election campaign begins.

November 23, 2011

I've picked an entirely unrepresentative section from last night's GOP debate on national security; unrepresentative because it shows two people who know something of what they're talking about engaged in a somewhat substantive debate.

The Republican race overall is best viewed in the context of this brilliant, blistering polemic by David Frum, lifelong Republican, former Bush speechwriter, now considered an apostate by his own party because he hasn't followed it to the extreme, thoughtless right, represented most visibly by the Tea Party movement:

For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.

That Newt Gingrich is considered a remotely credible candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination - and his chances are now rather better than remote - is just further evidence of the party's degraded state.

Tufte has caused me to reflect upon something about which I'd only been half-aware: my iPhone 4 feels like a hostile object. Its sharp edges dig into the palm of my hand. That subsconsciously affects my whole relationship with it. It feels cold, affectless, unloveable. Here's Tufte:

There is no such hand in touchscreen computer devices. The touchscreen has no texture variation, has no physical surface information, is dead flat, reflects ambient light noise, and features oily fingerprint debris when seen at a raking angle. Also the elegant sharp edges that encase many touchscreens require users to desensitize their hands in order to ignore the physical discomfort produced by the aggressive edges. Last year in Cupertino, I yelled at some people about touchscreens that paid precise attention to finger touches from the user but not to how the device in turn touches the hands of the user (and produces divot edge-lines in the flesh).

What Tufte is writing about isn't just about the iPhone but the whole new category of handheld devices and screens that has sprung up in the last twenty years. Their functionality is way out ahead of their human qualities - of the way they feel. Perhaps one day we'll design a digital device that feels as good as a book.

Tufte again:

So instead let us give more time for doing physical things in the real world and less time for staring at (and touching) the glowing flat rectangle.

November 17, 2011

Over 130,000 people died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The correlates of survival are examined using data from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), a population-representative survey collected in Aceh and North Sumatra, Indonesia, before and after the tsunami. Children, older adults and females were the least likely to survive. Whereas socio-economic factors mattered relatively little, the evidence is consistent with physical strength playing a role. Pre-tsunami household composition is predictive of survival and suggests that stronger members sought to help weaker members: men helped their wives, parents and children, while women helped their children.

I watched Martin Scorsese's documentary on George Harrison over the weekend and really enjoyed it. I have been helplessly in love with the Beatles ever since I was a boy, and remain fascinated by their story, and by the interplay of the four strong characters who made up the band. The film had many treasures: lots of fantastic footage I hadn't seen before, including - amazingly, to me - some of George and Paul wearily signing the legal papers that made formal the break-up of the group. There were great interviews with Olivia Harrison, Eric Clapton and Terry Gilliam, and charming letters written by George to his parents while on the road with The Beatles, the latter read by George's son, Dhani.

The film was a straightforward, albeit skilfully edited, hagiography (it was co-produced by Olivia) and it succeeded in highlighting some of George's most likeable qualities, including his sharp, sometimes acidic sense of humour, and a talent for making and maintaining friendships. I remain of the view, however, that George was the least likeable Beatle. He was a guy with a medium-sized talent who got very lucky when he hooked up with two geniuses, but - as the Slate writer Bill Wyman (not that Bill Wyman) points out - whereas Ringo was and remains so clearly aware of his good fortune, George seemed to cultivate a surly resentment over being gifted the moon on a stick.

I think my view of Harrison lies somewhere between Wyman's alternative takes, but perhaps closer to the second:

There are two ways to look at George Harrison. The nicer one is that he was a top-line and underappreciated guitarist, good enough to have spent many years as a close friend and occasional collaborator of Eric Clapton's; that he wrote at least two classic songs ("Something," and "Here Comes the Sun," two more than most songwriters write) and another half-dozen quite good ones...

The other and arguably more realistic appraisal might be that George Harrison's contributions as a guitarist were pretty much limited to a few Beatles riffs and the fine and quite recognizable slide sound he developed in his solo years. That producing two great songs after 10 intimate years with two of the top songwriters of the 20th century isn't awfully surprising, and that even if you throw in the other half-dozen, the total isn't much for a recording career that spanned almost 40 years; that most of his Beatles songs are inferior; that his voice was weak; that he was more than a bit of a mope; that he thoroughly embarrassed himself on his only American tour; and that the greater share of his solo work was poor, and that some of it was dreadful.

As Terry Gilliam points out near the start of the film, Harrison was an incongruous combination of guru and miser. The man who preached a non-materialist philosophy of life remained obsessed by tax rates for the whole of his adult life, from Taxman to his dying years, when he actually moved to Switzerland to avoid having to pay inheritance tax. He was also, as Olivia hints at and Wyman elaborates on, a prodigious philanderer. Still, Olivia seemed lovely and when Gilliam makes his observation, he does so with an affectionate guffaw, which made me think that perhaps Harrison's best qualities redeemed his worst.

One other not terribly interesting observation: it's remarkable how many of Harrison's biggest songs use the same trick - a descending bass line: While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Something, Long Long Long, Isn't It A Pity (Paul McCartney once said he stopped writing songs with descending bass lines because it was too easy).

November 14, 2011

On this evidence, I'd be surprised to see Herman Cain successfully manage a pizza order, let alone run the world's most powerful country:

Actually, all this shows is that Cain was never serious about running for president - his campaign is essentially promotional, intended to sell his brand to Fox and other conservative outlets. All that's happened is that, unexpectedly, many Republicans are taking him seriously as a politician. The joke is on them, not him.

Bill Keller, in the New York Times, makes a good point about the similarity between the two men who have the best odds of winning the 2012 general election:

(L)et’s contemplate the choice that awaits: two confident, intelligible, no-drama, rather distant men, each of whom seems to have overcompensated for bigot-arousing origins (Obama’s race, Romney’s religion) by being rational to a fault.

It's interesting that at a time when American politics is full of fire and ideology, two cool-blooded pragmatists should have risen to the top. This truly is the time of the technocrats.

November 10, 2011

This, from last night's Michigan debate, is so bad it might actually make you feel sorry for Rick Perry...

It's been called "the most devastating moment of any modern primary debate". Perry was already struggling, but it's hard to see how, even with his substantial piggy bank, anyone can take him seriously again.

But then, he shouldn't have been taken seriously in the first place, because he didn't take his candidacy seriously. By that, I don't mean he wasn't in it to win it - he was - but he never gave much evidence of having any interest in understanding the actual choices that an actual president - rather than a bad-Harrison-Ford-movie version of a president - would have to make.

He didn't care about policy, because he thought he could get by on posturing, and it's embarrassing for the modern Republican Party that, for a short while, it looked like he might be able to get away with it. It's even more embarrassing that the man sitting atop the polls, allegations of sexual harassment notwithstanding, makes Perry look like a man of substance. Herman Cain knows - and cares - even less. But he has his soundbites and his killer lines and his grin, and hey, apparently anyone can be president.

Romney does know stuff, and could clearly do the job. But nobody likes or trusts him. Huntsman is the only other serious candidate - serious in that he's got a substantial resume of governing, and knows his policy (especially foreign policy). But he worked for Obama (and hasn't set the debates alight).

The 2012 election is very winnable for the Republicans. But they have degraded themselves so much in recent years that they're now presented with a terrible choice of candidates, one of whom they will have to present to the electorate next year, probably with little enthusiasm. Lucky Obama.

November 08, 2011

When William Daley was appointed White House chief of staff in the wake of Obama's midterm "shellacking" there was much nodding of sage heads and murmurs of approval. An old Chicago hand (brother of Mayor Daley), a former banker with deep connections to Wall Street, an instinctive political centrist, he was seen as exactly the right man to drag the president back to the political centre-ground, rebuild relationships with business and generally get Obama back on course for victory in 2012.

Less than a year later, Obama has taken up a left-of-centre positioning, been more explicitly anti-business than ever before, and, despite a small recovery in his ratings in recent weeks, is not looking in great shape for 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, for the last few months there have been stories floating around about Daley's competence, or lack of it.

Today, we learn that he's been demoted. Not fired - the convention for chiefs of staff out of favour - but stripped of his responsibility for day-to-day management of the White House (he'll be replaced in that role by Pete Rouse, who did the job in an acting capacity before Daley joined). Daley will continue to advise the president and be his mouthpiece to the media and to business. But he'll be the first chief of staff not to have any staff.

The Obama brand is big on 'bottom-up' movements, and this sounds like a bottom-up initiative, driven by White House staffers revolting against a boss who was bad at managing them. It speaks well of Obama that he's done something about it, even at risk of embarrassing Daley, and himself, so soon after the appointment was made and heralded.

But that Daley was appointed in the first place is a manifestation of Obama's inexperience as a politician. He doesn't have a deep pool of allies and contacts in politics, and his antennae for people who can do big political jobs are not as sensitive as they might be.

You can see why he chose Daley - he's a West Wing idea of a chief of staff, a Chicago guy with a manly, reassuring mien who projects authority and confidence and uses all the right hand gestures. You can also see why Daley's appointment was gravely applauded by the mainly male commentariat, who tend to get a bit soppy about alpha males.

But the trouble with guys like Daley is that they get very far on just looking and sounding the part, and on knowing the right people, until they get a job where they need something more than superficial competence to succeed. The job of White House chief of staff must be one of the toughest in the world, requiring enormous stamina, drive, intelligence, sensitivity and guile. You can't just act the part.